Live Action Ben 10 Movie Moving Along

Life is rough when you’re a kid, especially when your life involves transforming into various alien creatures in order to help protect the world. That is the situation Ben Tennyson – the hero of Cartoon Network’s animated sci-fi children’s television show Ben 10 – is thrust into after finding a wrecked alien pod and having the watch-like Omnimatrix attach to his arm.

The Ben 10 franchise has been a boon to Cartoon Network, as it’s spawned multiple series (Ben 10, Ben 10: Alien Force, and Ben 10: Ultimate Alien), made for tv movies, games, and merchandise in the seven years since the first series premiered. Ben is set to return in a new television show (Ben 10: Omniverse) in September 2012, but there’s also a live-action feature film in the works.

Joel Silver, Andrew Rona, and Steve Richards are producing the film through Silver’s own Silver Studios, which just announced that it had signed screenwriter Albert Torres to the project. Torres has been in the news recently for doing a re-write on another live-action adaptation of an animated sci-fi property about a teenage boy with surprising powers – Akira.

This won’t be the first time Ben and his alien morphs will be featured in a live-action movie. Cartoon Network previously made Ben 10: Race Against Time in 2007 and Ben 10: Alien Swarm in 2009, both of which were directed by Alex Winter (Bill of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure fame). The new film that Torres is writing will be the Ben 10 franchise’s first theatrical release, though.